Diet your way to a long, miserable life!

"Calorie restricted" eaters have visions of eternal health dancing in their heads. But is life without pecan pie really worth living?

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Eating Disorders, Health, Anorexia, Thanksgiving, Rebecca Traister, Life, Food and Travel

Nov. 22, 2006 | There's a good chance that tomorrow your table will be groaning under the weight of soporific game birds and green-bean casserole (with cream of mushroom soup and Funyuns) and sweet potatoes with marshmallow crust. That is, of course, unless it's laden with Quorn. Quorn is the meat-free, soy-free, protein-rich fermented fungus recently featured in a New York magazine article about the growing popularity of calorie-restricted diets, in which practitioners subsist on a daily calorie intake that puts them just outside the grasp of starvation. In the story, writer Julian Dibbell sampled Quorn (which serves as a meat substitute and can be purchased as Chik'n and Turk'y) along with 24 carefully measured grams of arugula and a couple of scallops, as part of a purported "dinner party" thrown by a group of devoted CR dieters. The product's slogan is "Quorn: It just might surprise you."

Actually, I strongly doubt that it would.

But what has surprised me is exactly how glum I've felt ever since I read that damned New York magazine piece, and the wave of press that followed it, including a breathless "Today" show segment and a serious New York Times feature, both touting research that suggests that this absurdly ascetic, obsessively nutritious, borderline-starvation diet may delay aging and extend the life span of everything from mice to monkeys to -- gulp -- humans. Boooo!

This CR-news cycle has led to a lot of confusion: How are we supposed to regard our food, anyway? What does good health look like? What does it taste like? When we give thanks this year, should it be for the plenty on our tables, the time we share with our loved ones, or for our own good health? And are those gifts linked or at odds with each other?

Calorie-restricted dieters cut their food intake drastically, to around 1,200-1,400 calories a day for a woman and 1,800-2,000 for a man, depending on the individual's height and weight. Those meager metrics of tastiness must be further apportioned to constitute 30 percent protein, 30 percent fat and 40 percent carbs. It's an eating regimen that is greatly aided by calculators, computer software and postal scales.

Hard-core CR dieters usually lose a good deal of weight, though guidelines suggest no more than a pound a week. Some lose their ability to perform strenuous exercise, some (especially men) suffer from an altered or reduced libido, and women may stop getting their periods. Pictures of the diet's most devoted practitioners reveal them to be emaciated, like concentration-camp survivors or after-school-special cautionary tales or thinspiration models for pro-ana Web sites. With sunken facial features and hunched frames, these spokespeople hardly look like models of what is generally considered good health.

And yet, nerve-jangling evidence seems to suggest that they may be. According to research financed by the National Institute on Aging, severely limiting caloric intake has yielded health-boosting, life-extending results in animals on which it has been tested. The images of two rhesus monkeys recently featured in the New York Times are burned on my brain: Canto, who followed a version of a CR diet, remains spry into his dotage while his simian peer, Owen, has gotten old and fat and run-down on a regular, traditionally healthy diet of ... food. Humans who put themselves on gloomily scant meal plans appear to have better blood pressure, heart health and lower rates of illness than the rest of us mere mortals.

Apparently, paltry rations -- when measured out on charts and controlled to the über-psycho-microcaloric degree -- may in fact do precisely what CR zealots say they do: slow the aging process and extend life by as much as 50 percent. Scientists don't know why, exactly. Maybe the body goes into a hyper-efficient survival mode when deprived of fuel, or perhaps we simply strip our gears more slowly when we give them less to digest and excrete every day. Personally, I think these animals will themselves into living another day in the hope that tomorrow might bring a decent meal. But whatever the reason, for those of us who love food and are also mindful of our health, these revelations have been a major buzz kill.

Of course, if health research karma is a bitch, then foodies have had a slap coming. For years, medical news has gone our way. Chocolate? Red wine? Coffee? All good for us. Recall the highlight health bulletins of the past few years: Dairy products can help us lose weight, fatty fish helps our hearts, tomato sauce on pizza is full of lycopene. The once reviled egg turns out to be very healthy in moderation. Antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids have been the best things to happen to food since the term "al dente" got translated correctly. And can we talk about nuts and avocados? Oh salubrious bliss, found in a not-excessively-large serving of guacamole! Even the dismal pall of the Atkins years has begun to lift, as whole grains make a comeback and people acknowledge that ketosis was great and all until they popped a single cracker in their mouths and promptly gained 20 pounds.

So maybe we got spoiled, thinking we were doing great by our bodies by keeping them active and fueling them through the addition of delicious nutrients -- blueberries in our smoothies and $12 pomegranate juice in our cocktails! Our reflex at being told once more that health is about the subtraction -- of joy -- from our lives feels like a bucket of ice water thrown on us during a comfortable Sunday brunch. Perhaps this unwelcome news explains my general grumpiness not only about the CR diet but also about CR dieters themselves, or at least the ones I read about and see on television. Whether it's because these people are doing something antithetical to everything I believe is good for you in life -- or because they are doing it and yet continue to pass their medical tests with flying colors, my irritation knows no bounds.

The first thing you'll read about calorie restriction if you follow its press or check out any of its blogged literature is that it's completely, totally different from its look-alike cousin, anorexia nervosa. The major factor that separates the two is the CR dieter's fanatical attention to nutrients, packing every puny portion with maximum value. This is not disordered eating, supposedly, because CR dieters are concerned with extending their stay on earth, not with making themselves disappear.

CR also diverges from the debilitating deprivations of anorexia in that it is not rooted in body dysmorphia, the condition that leads its sufferers to hate what they see in the mirror. In fact, CR dieters -- one of whom, Michael Rae, is described in New York magazine as being 6 feet tall, weighing 115 pounds and having orange hands because of his high carotenoid intake -- like what they see when they look in mirrors and at each other. They like it a lot. "When I see a man like Michael," CR dieter Paul McGlothin kvells in New York, "I think that's how a man should be ... slim, bright, calorie-restricted!" And CR blogger April Smith, Rae's girlfriend, wrote recently that "CR is based in self-love, anorexia is based in self-hatred." Smith, who also explained her belief that in a country where so many women dislike their bodies, "it's important, nay, essential, that someone, preferably someone healthy, provide a counterweight," records most of her daily meals online, averaging 1,300 calories a day, sometimes dipping as low as 1,100.

A distorted sense of self-satisfaction, while on the whole a cheerier disorder than outsized self-loathing, can still be troubling, especially when it is the result of having forsaken eating habits that many people would love to be able to enjoy. When Matt Lauer introduced "Today's" CR segment by dramatically asking, "Could food itself be the problem?" it was hard not to wonder how insane we've become to devote airtime (larded with food commercials, no less) to demonizing something that people all over the world do not have enough of. Is it so that people who can afford organic scallops can live to be 150 while everybody else dies their regularly scheduled death?

Next page: Do I want another 80 years with my loved ones in which we all eat Quorn?